Language Learning
While many language learning apps utilize gamification in a productive manner, many of their other sides make them ineffective and frustrating. I will illuminate my philosophy of language learning and language app design here.
Don't punish mistakes
The other day I was trying to learn a language on two different apps, both of them had a score system in which you could lose lives. One of them called that “hearts”, the other called it “energy”. Hearts were drained when the user made a mistake, leading to something like 3 to 5 hearts a day to actually study. The energy system drains regardless of whether you make a mistake or not, punishing not only mistakes but also correct answers.
I get that many websites do this to get people to buy a subscription, but I distinctly remember a time when such companies managed to stay afloat economically while not using such system but rather pushing the user’s progress back until the mistakes have been fixed, leading to repeated exercise of weak skills.
Don’\t spoil the answer
Increasingly I’ve seen developers of language learning tools remove the ability to type your own answer and instead give the user a word bank. Now it should not come as a surprise that you won’t meaningfully learn a language when the sentence is “Ich esse Brot” and the wordbank has the words
,
,
,
,
. The answer is basically a deduction of the only or one of few meaningful answers through context. It doesn’t take a genius to simply guess such sentences without even seeing the original language you translate from.
Do give grammar hints
Sure, a learner will pick up on patterns by themselves, but having hints for grammar is extremely valuable in making languages easier to learn and to avoid misunderstanding of core features. It’s imperative that anyone who teaches a language does so with structured grammar, not just exposure to words.
If a word in a foreign language consists out of smaller bits, do teach the literal and the common meaning as this provides a view into that language’s culture and may help remember a word better. For example: I was taught the word for washroom in Chinese as 洗手间 (xǐshǒujiān) without explanation of what the individual parts mean and kept forgetting it. Once I knew that 洗=wash 手=hand 间=room it became much easier to remember.
Do teach the script
But not in the soul-crushingly boring one-at-a-time way, instead take syllables, small words and very basic sentences and repeat them by hand one letter or character at a time.